Field
This disclosure relates generally to semiconductor on insulator (SOI) devices, and more specifically, SOI devices with a guard ring.
Related Art
During semiconductor processing, electrical charges are collected by metal wires within the integrated circuit being manufactured. These electrical charges can cause damage to the gate oxides. This collection of electrical charges is typically referred to as the antenna effect. For bulk technologies, metal wires are connected to the source/drain regions of a transistor to discharge these collected charges to the bulk substrate. However, with SOI devices, this solution is not available. Firstly, in SOI devices, the sources and drains are insulated from the bulk substrate by a buried oxide (BOX) layer, thus not serving as good discharge paths for the charges. Furthermore, it may be desirable to dynamically switch between forward body biasing and reverse body biasing, which prevents traditional antenna diodes from properly discharging the charges. Therefore, a need exists for addressing the antenna effect in SOI devices.